struggles for gender equality; struggles against the ruling elites who destroy nature (and us, as part of nature). All of these struggles need to explore bridges, thresholds, and passages between themselves in order to construct networks of solidarity and shared hopes.
All-encompassing plans for an emancipatory future have often turned into nightmares, possibly because the richness of practices of transition was either ignored or suppressed. Transition is not simply a means to an end; experiences of transition unleash potentialities of change that are experienced in the present. In place of borders between a capitalist present and a liberated future, today’s struggles create passages towards an emancipating beyond. They show people—beyond those who participate in them—that another kind of social relations is possible. In small-scale thresholds towards the future, as in the everydayness of neighborhood relations based on mutual aid, as well as in large-scale thresholds like those briefly opened by the occupied squares movement or, more permanently by the struggles of the Zapatistas, the lives of real existing people become open to change. The search for ways to take hold of lives wasted in cruel divisive societies (if not in cruel wars) makes people inventive. As members of societies in movement, orienting this inventiveness towards the construction of thresholds might be our task. And sharing, as a multileveled process of equalitarian solidarity, will have to be invented anew—not only as a practice that defies antagonism and egoistic reasoning but also as a process of constructing alternative social relations.
Is the city of thresholds one more canonic utopia? Is it a conceptually neat utopia, perhaps? I hope not, because I experienced it in the Syntagma Square occupation in 2011and I keep sensing its flavor in everyday actions of mutual aid in crisis-ridden Athens. I also saw it emerging previously in the heterotopias of the 2008 December uprising. And I believe we may trace its characteristics in the many spaces of contemporary urban commoning that develop within and against the city of enclaves.
Approaching otherness and creating shared worlds may indeed be developed through concrete urban experiences. Otherwise, dreams, no matter how urgently needed, tend to cover up reality. To explore the possible existing beyond capitalism and domination, we might need to develop new ways to enact the possible. Not in enclaves of heroic otherness but through metastatic thresholds in which human liberation is developed and tested.
Athens
March 2018
Introduction:
spatiotemporal thresholds and the experience of otherness
While attempting to consider the role space has in the potential emancipatory transformation of society, radical thinking and action tend to take for granted that space contains, delimits, and thus identifies social life. Spaces of emancipation are mostly envisaged either as freed strongholds to be defended or as enclaves of otherness. It is important, however, to think of space not as a container of society but as a formative element of social practices. Imagining a different future means trying to experience and conceptualize spatialities that may help create different social relations.
People experience space but also think through space and imagine through space. Space not only gives form to the existing social world (experienced and understood as a meaningful life condition), but also to possible social worlds that may inspire action and express collective dreams.
Seeking to explore, then, the ways space is potentially connected to processes of emancipation we cannot be satisfied with the discovery of alleged “spaces of emancipation.” If emancipation is a process, it has to generate dynamic transformations and not simply institute defined areas of freedom. Spatial characteristics rather than concrete spaces become the focus of such an exploration. It is exactly at this level that the idea of threshold emerges to convey the spatial dynamics of emancipation. As will be shown, thresholds mark and give meaning to the act of crossing as productive of change.
This book’s main argument is that emancipatory spatiality emerges in the creation and social use of thresholds. Social struggles and movements are greatly influenced by the formative potentialities of thresholds. Fragments of a different life, experienced during the struggle, take form in spaces and times with threshold characteristics. When people collectively realize that their actions are becoming different from their usual collective habits, then encountering boundaries becomes liberating.
It is in everyday encounters with otherness that people develop an art of negotiation based on the collective creation of in-between spaces, i.e., thresholds. During periods of liberating change, this art is practiced to its maximum potentiality. Struggles that implicitly or explicitly aim at changes in common life may merely create temporary enclaves of otherness. However, otherness may also be experienced as the inhabiting of in-between spaces and times, i.e., thresholds. In a self-organizing neighborhood these spaces and times are created in assemblies, demonstrations, or common meals. In a rebellious Zapatista municipality, thresholds become the means to invent new tactics of collective self-determination.
Encountering otherness can be potentially liberating as long as it invents passages from self to other. This means approaching otherness as a process rather than a state. Movements need to investigate an “art of doing” that helps people discover, create, and appreciate otherness. We can think of the city of thresholds as the always-emergent work of a collective effort to create a liberating future. An emancipated “public culture” will hopefully be created out of these thresholds to otherness, bonds of solidarity, and new forms of common life.
Beyond borders
Many assume the imposition of boundaries in human settlements is a natural phenomenon. Observing animals in the process of defining their territory, some suggest that a kind of natural will compels marking boundaries of an area where a single being or group reigns supreme. Territoriality appears as a natural need arising from the urge to survive while fighting against enemies or rivals. Thus, the demarcation of an area goes hand-in-hand with its description as a potential site of fighting. Although the act of marking out an area seems to be an attempt to ward off a fight it necessarily constitutes a declaration of war.
However, humans create settlements not only to define boundaries in order to secure a community that senses the hostility of the surrounding environment; boundaries are also crossings. An often-complicated set of ritual acts, symbolic gestures, and movements accompanies the crossing of boundaries. Invasion is only one among many other possible ways to cross the borders. So we could agree with Georg Simmel that man is not only “a bordering creature” but also the “creature who has no border” (Simmel 1997a, 69).
The creation of an enclosure, in Simmel’s words, contains the “possibility at any moment of stepping out of this limitation into freedom” (ibid.). If the bridge and the door materially exemplify this ability to separate and connect at the same time—since “the human being is the connecting creature who must always separate and cannot connect without separating” (ibid.)—then we must begin to understand bordering as an act that contains many possible meanings. It is not only the declaration of war on otherness but also the possibility of crossing the bridge towards otherness. It is not only hostility but also, perhaps, negotiation.
An exile, always feeling away from home, would probably describe an emphatically characteristic border consciousness. In the words of an activist who was forced to leave South Africa: “Indeed, the experiences and products of exile could be a dissolvent of border consciousness. It could be a way of reconnoitering, shifting and extending the limits” (Breytenbach 1993, 76).
An exile understands that borders possess the power to cut people off from the places that define them, their history, and their identity. But while away and not permitted to come back, the exile realizes that identity
